Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact (www.theregister.com)

The UK has signed a defense pact with U.S. data‑analytics firm Palantir that officials say will unlock £1.5 billion of investment and make Palantir’s European HQ for defense based in Britain. Palantir CEO Alex Karp pledged up to £750 million of spending and the deal is expected to create about 350 jobs. Signed under the Strategic Defence Review’s “Digital Targeting Web,” the agreement tasks Palantir with partnering with the UK military to deploy AI‑powered capabilities—drawing on tools trialled in Ukraine—for faster decision‑making, military planning, data fusion and targeting by combining open‑source and classified data sources. For the AI/ML community this is significant on multiple fronts: it signals large-scale public investment in deployed ML systems for operational decision support, increased demand for secure data‑fusion pipelines, real‑time inference at scale, model governance, and interoperability between civilian and defense ecosystems (potentially easing UK startup access to U.S. markets). It also heightens ethical, legal and technical scrutiny—questions about human‑in‑the‑loop controls, model explainability, bias, data provenance and targeting accuracy become central. The pact joins wider tech commitments (Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, OpenAI etc.) that together claim ~£31 billion for UK AI infrastructure, underscoring Britain’s intent to build compute, tooling and commercial pathways even as Palantir’s controversial ties to intelligence and immigration agencies stoke debate.